Artfully Built Nests Await Feathering

By GEORGIA DULLEA

Published: April 12, 1990

LAURA FOREMAN has designed a series of whimsical houses for leafy sites around Manhattan. The city is a second home for a couple of her prospective clients, the house wrens that fly in seasonally on business or on pleasure. Others, like the house sparrows, have their primary residence in New York. This being spring, the birds are house hunting, which is where Ms. Foreman and a gardening group called the Green Guerillas come in.

In ceremonies next week, birdhouses by Ms. Foreman will be installed in five neighborhood gardens from the Lower East Side to the Upper West Side. The sites were chosen by the Green Guerillas and the $12,000 cost of the rent-free housing program for birds was underwritten by an anonymous private donor. A prototype of one birdhouse will spend a year on the road with the Cityarts Creative Process Traveling Show, stopping at galleries and museums around town.

Seeing her birdhouses hung in galleries is nothing new for the 43-year-old sculptor and choreographer. When her ''Birdhouse as Metaphor'' exhibit showed last year at the Souyun Yi Gallery in SoHo, The New Yorker magazine called the sculptures ''serious ruminations on the housing crisis, homelessness and personal entrapment.''

Now Ms. Foreman is waiting to hear from the critics with feathers. ''There's no guarantee that birds will move in,'' she was saying the other day, ''but the idea of living occupants in my works is exciting.'' Around her, in the TriBeCa loft where she has lived for 10 years, were dozens of wooden birdhouses, including a jaunty tenement, with a television aerial for a perch. It mirrors in miniature a four-story yellow brick building facing the Clinton community garden on West 48th Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

The building is known on the block as the Mary Frances Carpenter house, in memory of a beloved neighbor who sat for years in the ground-floor window, greeting gardeners and passing them the key to the garden gate. A plaque gives her date of death as Nov. 3, 1983.

After designing the house, the artist learned that Miss Carpenter had been a paraplegic for most of her 67 years. ''With the tenement birdhouse, she flies free, in a way, above the garden,'' she said.

Like the other birdhouses, the tenement conforms to code, ornithologically speaking. Ms. Foreman had the advice of experts on fine points like size of hole, depth of cavity, perch and provision for nest removal.

The houses are all single-family dwellings since wrens and sparrows are solitary nesters. If her clients had been the very neighborly purple martins, Ms. Foreman could have branched out into condominiums.

She has grown fond of her plain brown birds. ''They're real city birds, feisty and territorial,'' she said. ''They're survivors.''

She paused before a bright and gritty box for the sparrows of El Jardin del Paraiso on Fifth Street between Avenues C and D. One could almost hear salsa playing inside.

A mosaic of broken tiles from the construction debris near the garden decorated the roof. Here and there were miniatures of the street scene - a bicycle tire, a park bench, a ragged railing around a patio where, the artist said, ''funky birds can hang out.''

The original plan showed a tiny cocaine spoon dangling from the patio. But the neighborhood gardeners thought the drug metaphor hit too close to home, and so it was dropped. This was not the only time Ms. Foreman went back to the drawing board.

From the time of her first meeting with the Green Guerillas, a nonprofit group that provides plants and technical assistance to community gardens, Ms. Foreman said it took 18 months and countless talks amid the tomato plants and sunflowers before final plans for the birdhouses got a green thumbs up. ''The people in these parks don't want some artist coming in and plunking down something they don't like,'' Ms. Foreman said. ''It's their space.''

Birds in the three other gardens will find equally splendid digs. For the Liz Christy Garden, a leafy enclave at Bowery and Houston Streets, named for the founder of the Green Guerillas, there is a home of opalescent stained glass over wood, to hang from a birch tree near a frog pond. An elegant gazebo-shaped birdhouse with a copper weatherwave is a miniature of gazebo that dominates the Green Oasis Garden on Eighth Street between Avenues C and D. House wrens will stuff twigs in coffee cans to make their homes. Ms. Foreman is hoping they will nest in a redwood house with lattice trim, to be hung from the arches of the West Side Garden.

Among the 95 or so gardeners who work the soil in this garden between 89th to 90th Street and Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues are children from neighborhood schools.

Ms. Foreman said she thought they might enjoy the wren house because of its ''fairy tale'' quality. ''But don't ask me what wrens want,'' she added. ''I'm just winging it.''

Photos: Laura Foreman with her tenement for birds, to be installed on West 48th Street. (The New York Times/Jim Estrin) (pg. C1); Sparrow house for a garden on East Fifth Street.; Laura Foreman hopes to attract wrens to a redwood birdhouse on West 89th Street.; Gazebo birdhouse for the Green Oasis Garden in the East Village;the weathervane is copper.; Birdhouse of opalescent stained glass and wood will hang from a birch tree in the Liz Christy Garden. (The New York Times/Jim Estrin); (pg. C12)